Friends send me YouTube links, and some of them are choice. Here are a few I’ve been enjoying recently.
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Sometimes homemade talent can surpass the pros. Consider the case of Mexican YouTuber Gawx who does more creative film shots in his bedroom than Hollywood achieves with huge budgets. (Here’s an example from his channel, which now has more than 2 million subscribers. And here’s another.)
In this video interview Gawx explains some of his tricks and techniques.
A photographer visits the last surviving NY artists who operate under the protection of the 1982 loft law. Some of these artists are now in their nineties, and seeing them in their natural habitats is like taking a time machine to a different era.
I’m still grieving the death of concert pianist Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024) at age 82. It’s hard when the heroes of our youth—seemingly so titanic and invincible, especially in Pollini’s case—leave us behind.
This short video captures Pollini in performance as a teenager at the 1960 Chopin Piano Competition. Arthur Rubinstein served as head of the jury who gave Pollini the award that year, and offered his candid assessment: “That boy can play the piano better than any of us.”
P.S. Tim Page alerted me to this recording of Pollini playing the Chopin Etudes, circa 1956, when the pianist was just 14 or 15. Frankly, I find this second performance hard to believe.
I have huge hands—I can palm a basketball—and when I tackled that first etude, with its rapid-fire arpeggios in tenths, I felt that my adult handspan was barely capable of reaching those notes. I can’t imagine an early teen playing what I hear in this recording. But by all accounts, Pollini was doing just that in the mid-1950s.
Let’s pay a visit to Michael Imperioli’s New York apartment. I know him from The Sopranos, Goodfellas, and The White Lotus, but I had no idea he had recreated the Renaissance in his home. (His wife Victoria helped a lot—she’s a set designer and interior decorator.)
A year ago, I would have said that the Imperioli household is hopelessly anachronistic. But in the current moment, this feels more like part of the emerging resistance.
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